Sunday, September 03, 2017

Counterpunch | Theodore W. Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race,
republished by Verso Books in a New Expanded Edition, presents a
full-scale challenge to what Allen refers to as “The Great White
Assumption” – “the unquestioning, indeed unthinking acceptance of the
‘white’ identity of European-Americans of all classes as a natural
attribute rather than a social construct.” Its thesis on the origin and
nature of the “white race” contains the root of a new and radical
approach to United States history, one that challenges master narratives
taught in the media and in schools, colleges, and universities. With
its equalitarian motif and emphasis on class struggle it speaks to
people today who strive for change worldwide.

Allen’s original 700-pages magnum opus, already recognized as a
“classic” by scholars such as Audrey Smedley, Wilson J. Moses, Nell
Painter, and Gerald Horne, included extensive notes and appendices based
on his twenty-plus years of primary source research.The
November 2012 Verso edition adds new front and back matter, expanded
indexes, and internal study guides for use by individuals, classes, and
study groups. Invention is a major contribution to our historical
understanding, it is meant to stand the test of time, and it can be
expected to grow in importance in the 21st century.

“When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619,
there were no ‘white’ people there; nor, according to the colonial
records, would there be for another sixty years.”

That arresting statement, printed on the back cover of the first
(1994) volume, reflected the fact that, after poring through 885
county-years of Virginia’s colonial records, Allen found “no instance of
the official use of the word ‘white’ as a token of social status” prior
to its appearance in a 1691 law. As he explained, “Others living in the
colony at that time were English; they had been English when they left
England, and naturally they and their Virginia-born children were
English, they were not ‘white.’” “White identity had to be carefully
taught, and it would be only after the passage of some six crucial
decades” that the word “would appear as a synonym for
European-American.”

Allen was not merely speaking of word usage, however. His probing
research led him to conclude – based on the commonality of experience
and demonstrated solidarity between African-American and
European-American laboring people, the lack of a substantial
intermediate buffer social control stratum, and the “indeterminate”
status of African-Americans – that the “white race” was not, and could
not have been, functioning in early Virginia.

It is in the context of such findings that he offers his major thesis
— the “white race” was invented as a ruling class social control
formation in response to labor solidarity as manifested in the later,
civil war stage of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676-77). To this he adds two
important corollaries: 1) the ruling elite, in its own class interest,
deliberately instituted a system of racial privileges to define and
maintain the “white race” and 2) the consequences were not only ruinous
to the interests of African-Americans, they were also “disastrous” for
European-American workers, whose class interests differed fundamentally
from those of the ruling elite. The Invention of the White Race Volume II